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God’s Anger over Jerusalem

¹ How the Lord has covered the Daughter of Zion with His cloud of anger! He has cast the glory of Israel from heaven to earth. He has abandoned His footstool in the day of His anger.² Without pity the Lord has swallowed up all the dwellings of Jacob. In His wrath He has demolished the fortified cities of the Daughter of Judah. He brought to the ground and defiled her kingdom and its princes.³ He has cut off every horn of Israel in His fierce anger and withdrawn His right hand at the approach of the enemy. He has burned in Jacob like a flaming fire that consumes all around it.⁴ He has bent His bow like an enemy; His right hand is positioned. Like a foe He has killed all who were pleasing to the eye; He has poured out His wrath like fire on the tent of the Daughter of Zion.⁵ The Lord is like an enemy; He has swallowed up Israel. He swallowed up all her palaces and destroyed her strongholds. He has multiplied mourning and lamentation in the Daughter of Judah.⁶ He has laid waste to His tabernacle like a garden booth; He has destroyed His place of meeting. The LORD has made Zion forget her appointed feasts and Sabbaths. In His fierce anger He has despised both king and priest.⁷ The Lord has rejected His altar; He has abandoned His sanctuary; He has handed the walls of her palaces over to the enemy. They have raised a shout in the house of the LORD as on the day of an appointed feast.⁸ The LORD determined to destroy the wall of the Daughter of Zion. He stretched out a measuring line and did not withdraw His hand from destroying. He made the ramparts and walls lament; together they waste away.⁹ Her gates have sunk into the ground; He has destroyed and shattered their bars. Her king and her princes are exiled among the nations, the law is no more, and even her prophets find no vision from the LORD.

¹⁰ The elders of the Daughter of Zion sit on the ground in silence. They have thrown dust on their heads and put on sackcloth. The young women of Jerusalem have bowed their heads to the ground.¹¹ My eyes fail from weeping; I am churning within. My heart is poured out in grief over the destruction of the daughter of my people, because children and infants faint in the streets of the city.¹² They cry out to their mothers: “Where is the grain and wine?” as they faint like the wounded in the streets of the city, as their lives fade away in the arms of their mothers.¹³ What can I say for you? To what can I compare you, O daughter of Jerusalem? To what can I liken you, that I may console you, O virgin Daughter of Zion? For your wound is as deep as the sea. Who can ever heal you?¹⁴ The visions of your prophets were empty and deceptive; they did not expose your guilt to ward off your captivity. The oracles they saw for you were empty and misleading.¹⁵ All who pass by clap their hands at you in scorn. They hiss and shake their heads at the Daughter of Jerusalem: “Is this the city that was called the perfection of beauty, the joy of all the earth?”¹⁶ All your enemies open their mouths against you. They hiss and gnash their teeth, saying, “We have swallowed her up. This is the day for which we have waited. We have lived to see it!”¹⁷ The LORD has done what He planned; He has accomplished His decree, which He ordained in days of old. He has overthrown you without pity; He has let the enemy gloat over you and exalted the horn of your foes.¹⁸ The hearts of the people cry out to the Lord. O wall of the Daughter of Zion, let your tears run down like a river day and night. Give yourself no relief, and your eyes no rest.¹⁹ Arise, cry out in the night from the first watch of the night. Pour out your heart like water in the presence of the Lord. Lift up your hands to Him for the lives of your children who are fainting from hunger on the corner of every street.²⁰ Look, O LORD, and consider: Whom have You ever treated like this? Should women eat their offspring, the infants they have nurtured? Should priests and prophets be killed in the sanctuary of the Lord?²¹ Both young and old lie together in the dust of the streets. My young men and maidens have fallen by the sword. You have slain them in the day of Your anger; You have slaughtered them without compassion.²² You summoned my attackers on every side, as for an appointed feast day. In the Day of the LORD’s anger no one escaped or survived. My enemy has destroyed those I nurtured and reared.